Chris Whitaker has the bona fides of a thriller rock star. He was the 2021 winner of the Crime Writers’ Association New Blood Dagger Award for his debut Tall Oaks, he won three further prestigious crime prizes for his 2020 novel We Begin at the End, and that book is now being developed for TV. And now he has delivered a masterpiece that might just eclipse them both.
Just as he did in those novels, in the outstanding All the Colours of the Dark, the British author excels in creating a small American town rich in life, eccentric characters and overwhelming grief. Whitaker’s writing is stylishly literary; although he knows how to get the adrenaline going when the scene demands, this is far from the hard-boiled edge of the pulp novels that made the genre so popular.
Thirteen-year-old Joseph “Patch” Macauley is introduced on the first page, dressed in a tricorne and waistcoat, navy slacks tucked into his socks and fanned at the knee to resemble breeches.
“Later that day,” Whitaker writes, “the cops would crawl over the intricacies of his life and discover he was into pirates because he had been born with only one eye, and his mother peddled the romance of a cutlass and eye patch because often for kids like him the flair of fiction dulled a reality too severe.”
At the heart of the novel sits Patch’s kinship with his classmate and fellow oddball Saint Brown. While Patch, who lives in poverty, feels lesser than Saint and her grandmother – “he tried to exist in the shadow of their lives so they would not have to notice him” – Whitaker writes emotively of that yearning peculiar to adolescence that stretches beyond love or lust. It is an unbreakable bond that will last through a traumatic quarter of a century which begins in 1975, when Patch is abducted.
He is held in a pitch-black room, his only contact with life being a young girl, Grace, who appears alongside him one day, “smelling of the outside, of sun lotion and cherry gum and woodsmoke” and telling him of seabirds, serendipity and scriptures to make the time pass less abjectly.
Unbeknown to Patch, Saint is leading the search for him – and when she does find and rescue him early on in the novel, in a sweat-inducing scene in which his dungeon is burned to the ground, she realises she has lost him again. Not just the sweet-natured part of him that died in captivity, but also to a search for Grace, who has vanished in the conflagration.
What follows is an epic sprawl that takes Patch from high school to the mines (where the dark allows him to conjure Grace from memory), and travels from their home in Missouri across the US to meet the parents of other missing girls in the hope that they may lead him to Grace. Yet there is such little trace of her that it is not impossible that she was just a figment of his imagination, conjured by trauma and his need not to be alone.
Saint, meanwhile, follows a career path dictated by her natural inclination for detection, becoming a police officer in her home town before eventually following Patch around the country, ever aware of the need to find the girl who gives him meaning.
With a serial killer, bank robberies and a love triangle driving the action, and themes from religious fundamentalism to Roe v Wade-inspired feminism informing the background, the plotting is impeccable, leading to a denouement that feels inevitable even though it would take a reader of exceptional perceptiveness to see twists ahead of time.
The book is hefty, at 576 pages, but it allows Whitaker to flesh out those characters and make them utterly real. The only misgiving I had was in the final 20 pages – a coda, of sorts, that ties up the narrative a little too prettily for my taste. It may feel like catharsis for some, but for me it was a small misstep in what is otherwise the finest thriller I have ever read.
Published by Orion, £20